


Light and Shadow

by BootsnBlossoms



Series: Walking the Wall [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Magical!Lestrade, Sentient!London, Urban Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 01:57:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2795537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BootsnBlossoms/pseuds/BootsnBlossoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bare form untouched by anything but the shadow of Greg’s ancient lace curtains, Molly's request was a simple one.</p><p> <br/><i>“I wish I could see things the way you see them.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Light and Shadow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abrae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abrae/gifts).



> A simple, sensual coda to Walking the Wall.
> 
> For my lovely friend [abrae](http://acafanmom.tumblr.com) who deserves all the beautiful things to make her happy. <3 
> 
> Inspired by this:
> 
>  

The snap of a window latch drew Greg back to consciousness, pulling him from the dream of formless, nameless, pleasant existence he’d been floating in. His body felt unusually heavy, as if gravity had tightened its grip on him to keep him from floating away into his dream world, and it took a great act of concentrated effort to roll his head toward the creaky sound of his flat’s window swinging open.  
  
“Molly?”  
  
“Go back to sleep,” she whispered, voice sleepy and still sated from the evening’s earlier activities. Something loosened in Greg’s chest as he realized that her side of the bed was still warm, that she’d only just gotten up.  
  
“Not trying to sneak out on me, are you?” he teased, pulling the blankets tight around his shoulders when his bare skin was assaulted by London’s cool autumn air.  
  
“No,” Molly replied, voice low in the darkness. “I just… You have a lovely view up here.”  
  
Greg frowned, trying to read between the lines, trying to unearth meaning from under Molly’s quiet reluctance. He cracked his eyes open and propped himself up on his elbows.  
  
Reclining against the wooden sill, Molly’s petite body was framed by moonlight and starlight and the light of London herself as it spilled through the windows of buildings all around them. Her long hair fell in cascades over her shoulders and down her back, tiny wisps stirred by the ebb and flow of the incoming breeze. Her skin was pebbled and her nipples were hard and straining in the cold, but she didn’t have her arms wrapped around herself to defend from the chill. In fact, her bare form was untouched by anything but the shadow of Greg’s ancient lace curtains.  
  
Breath caught in his throat, Greg shoved his duvet away and sat up. It was hardly a choice, leaving the warmth of his bed to join Molly where she stared wistfully out at the nighttime sky. One moment he was frozen in the warm sheets, absorbing the beauty of his lover, and the next he was standing centimeters behind Molly, dragging his lips over the curve of her shoulder.    
  
“You are so beautiful,” he murmured.  
  
Molly tipped her head, a soft smile drawn at the corner of her lips, and Greg hummed happily, pressing his nose against the steady, soothing thrum of her pulse point.  
  
“I wish I could see things the way you see them,” Molly said quietly.  
  
After Greg gave his sleep-addled brain a moment to process, he realized where Molly’s earlier hesitation had come from. Tonight’s dinner conversation had been about auras and energies, and the way London had a visual personality made up of colors and waves that only magical folk could see. Now her eyes were trained on the city laid out before them, her expression sad with longing, and Greg kicked himself for causing her melancholy. As much as he delighted in sharing his world with her, experiencing magic anew through her eyes, he’d forgotten how isolating it could be, having a gift that couldn’t be shared.  
  
Or couldn’t it?  
  
“I might be able to do something about that,” Greg said offered. He traced a projection of the victorian rose that covered her shoulder, fingers interrupting the paths of light and shadow as he thought. “It might give you a headache, though.”  
  
“Please?” Molly reached up to stop the progress of Greg’s fingers by curling her own around them.  
  
“All right.”  
  
The building Greg lived in was old. _Old._ The cornerstone once felt the crush of Roman footfalls stomping it into the ground back when Londinium was barely a two square kilometer camp. Every brick in the building had some similar memory embedded in its mortar that made Greg feel safe, surrounded by the proof that time does not erase all things. He’d lived in this flat for nearly five years now - plenty of time to learn every crack and crevice, every stone and fossil, every route from his seventh-floor bedroom to the bare earth underneath.  
  
He turned Molly so that she was facing the wall next to the window. She shivered, her body still bare of anything but lacy shadows of flowers and leaves, soft and open to his gentle movements. Greg considered and rejected the idea of getting a blanket from the bed to warm her; so much contact between bare skin would make his little spell so much easier. He flattened himself along her back and threaded his fingers through hers, then pressed her hands palms down against the rough brick. He closed his eyes, whispered ancient words of connection and flight, and directed his Sight to travel through her and into the structure he knew so well.  
  
To Molly, it probably felt like falling. Greg let his consciousness sink into the building, following the well-worn paths of his magic through crack and crevice and stone and sand to the cool dirt below. Not many people knew it, but subterranean London was actually full of anomalies, not the least of which were hundreds of years of tunnels and a spiderweb of underground rivers. Greg let his mind skate and soar through and over them, letting Molly see not in terms of light and shadow and color, but in the spaces between the flow of energy. Underground London felt something like a negative to Greg, visible only in the absence of light and movement. Water felt like white threads being pulled over black velvet, tunnels felt like holes left behind by long-gone needles, and the creatures of the underworld moved around an in between without drawing much notice. This was London at her most basic, most wild: millennia of thought, intention, energy, and movement sunk into barely moving geology, a chaotic mass of microcosms working together in entropy and silence to provide the foundation most people took for granted as dead and unmoving.  
  
Somewhere in his mind, Greg felt Molly gasp and shudder against him, and he slowed their exploration to keep from hurting her unaccustomed mind. Though Molly had seen, felt, and even participated in a fair bit of magic since their relationship began, this was the first time she’d experienced it as Greg did.  
  
Once he started taking Molly through some of his favorite places - the colorful water drops that danced and splattered at Granary Square Fountain, the vibrant song-filled walls of Wilton’s Music hall, the quiet power in the seemingly endless rings inside the ancient (over 2,000 year-old) yew tree in the St. Andrew’s churchyard - he grew more and more excited. He wanted to show Molly _everything_.  
  
But when, at the London Aquarium, he opened her mind to the thousands of colors as seen through the mantis shrimp’s eyes (who had sixteen color-receptive cones in their eyes instead of the piddly three possessed by humans), he felt the sharp tug of Molly’s mental retreat. She couldn’t pull herself back to her body without Greg’s magic leading the way, however, and her panic scored like the sharp edge of an obsidian blade against his soul. He shied from it instinctively for just a thoughtless second before snapping them both back to their bodies in a powerful discharge of magic that left him reeling.  
  
Back in the bedroom, Greg swayed with the backlash, only barely keeping himself from collapsing against Molly’s shaking form.  
  
“Greg,” she croaked, her fingers curling under his hands, her body wracked with shudders. “It’s so much. I never…”  
  
“Shhh…” he soothed, pulling himself back together. He reluctantly untangled their hands only too scoop Molly up, arms under her knees and behind her shoulders, to carry her back to bed. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Molly whimpered as Greg laid her out, facedown, on the bed. “What for?”  
  
“I’ve never been able to share that with anyone before. I guess I got too excited. Overdid it.”  
  
“No,” Molly said, shaking her head against the pillow, little sparks of static flaring up between her hair and the white of his sheets. Then she hesitated, a tiny smile quirking at the corner of her mouth. “Well, maybe. It was a lot, for my first -”  
  
“Magical mystery tour?” Greg suggested, sitting next to her on the bed.  
  
Molly laughed and tucked her face into the pillow. The noise she made was too muffled to be verbal, but Greg was certain it was a yes anyway.  
  
“Thank you,” Greg said. He dragged his knuckles down her back, slowly stroking her from neck to lower back, before chasing the line again with his mouth. Molly was no longer cold, but flushed and warm as if her body believed their adventure had been physical. Greg grinned against her skin, already imagining other possibilities for that particular spell. “Thank you for letting me show you.”  
  
“I’m sure we can do it again, see more, travel longer, when I get used to it,” Molly said. Greg pressed a grateful kiss between her shoulder blades, hand tracing the curve of her breast where it pressed against the sheets, and she shuddered under him. She tightened her grip on the pillow, white knuckles betraying her tension, and rolled her hips against the mattress. “No headache,” she offered, lifting her head to grin mischievously at him.  
  
Something tight and scarred and dark loosened its grip on Greg’s heart as Molly rolled onto her back. It would never go away, the little nameless fear that some day magic would be too much for her, that she would leave him the way his ex had because of what he was. But moments like this chipped away at the fear, and gratefulness swelled in his chest, more addictive than any spell every could be.  
  
“Next time,” Greg said as he crawled on top of Molly and pulled the covers over them, “we’ll visit the remains of one of Venus’ temples buried a few hundred feet under Cheapside. You won’t believe what kind of energies still cling to those stones.”  
  
“Oh,” Molly laughed as she wrapped her arms around Greg’s neck to pull him into a kiss. “I think I have an idea.”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Fic previews, eye candy, prompt fills, and gpoy galore [on my Tumblr](http://bootsnblossoms.tumblr.com).


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